Pop fiction.

Tinseltown Tale

Louise Bagshawe Puts Together Quite A Package With `Triple Feature'

Just 25, Louise Bagshawe has already enjoyed success in England with her debut, "Career Girls." She recently moved from Dublin to Los Angeles, and it's hard to imagine how she knows so much about today's Hollywood to have come up with her latest, Triple Feature (Simon & Schuster, $23).

Her three dissimilar heroines bond because they all worship at the shrine of the bottom line. The good old boys at Artemis Studios just can't wait for their first female president, Eleanor Marshall, to fall flat on her face. Instead, with the help of a poverty-stricken free-lance writer and a bad-tempered supermodel who has always wanted to be a movie star, Marshall puts together a film package to die for. Sinfully good fun from a sinfully good writer.

Sanctuary, by Nora Roberts (Putnam, $23.95).

Sometimes the atmosphere of a novel is so powerfully rendered that setting assumes the importance of another character. Anne Rivers Siddons has this knack, and so does Nora Roberts. The place she describes in "Sanctuary," a dot in the sea off the coast of Georgia, sounds not unlike Cumberland Island, where John Kennedy Jr. was secretly wed. There are secrets aplenty in the Hathaway family's inn, none of them festive. Photographer Jo Ellen Hathaway visits her beautiful homeplace rarely and reluctantly; the memory of her mother's disappearance almost 20 years earlier, when Jo was 7, is too raw. But the nightmares that plagued her when she was younger have started again, and she has been receiving anonymous packets of photos made frightening by their intimacy. She returns to the inn and finds that a sadistic stalker is prowling the island. While you're trying to unmask him, smell the sea breeze and admire the beauty of the Spanish moss.

A Woman's Place, by Barbara Delinsky (HarperCollins, $22).

Various know-it-alls have blamed everything from gangsta rap to date rape on the feminist backlash. Now the deck often seems to be stacked against the ladies in family court as well: Working moms can no longer assume they'll get the kids, based solely on their sex. In "A Woman's Place," Claire Raphael thinks she has all her bases covered. When she's not caring for her young son and daughter, she's trying to shore up her shaky marriage; her vintage furniture business has supported the family as her husband's investments have failed. Returning from a business trip, Claire is slapped with divorce papers. Dennis doesn't want much--just the kids, the house and half of her business. An outcome that once would have seemed impossible begins to look more and more likely. As a male lawyer tells Claire, independent career women like her "don't inspire sympathy."

Change of Heart, by Tracy Stern (Simon & Schuster, $22).

Some novelists smoothly execute the transition from paperback romance to hardcover trade fiction. Tami Hoag and LaVyrle Spencer are current best-selling examples of how to do it right. Tracy Stern is an example of something else altogether. In "Change of Heart," her grieving heroine, Kerry, is recently married and pregnant when her young husband is killed in an auto accident. She decides she will put the child up for adoption, then wonders if she has made a mistake. To find out how it all turns out, you'll have to wade through dialogue like this: "Because we live in inflationary times, I will give you not just a penny, but an entire dollar for your thoughts." Maybe real people speak this way. Or maybe not.

Affair, by Amanda Quick (Bantam, $23.95).

"Affair" boasts yet another deliciously outspoken Victorian protagonist from Amanda Quick (Jayne Ann Krentz). What is the origin of Charlotte Arkendale's handsome income? Her detractors think her a schemer-blackmailer. In fact, she's a kind of matrimonial private eye, protecting moneyed ladies from cads. She meets her match when she hires Baxter St. Ives as her bodyguard. This is intelligent froth at its best. The air is so laden with quasi-sexual bantering that you'll scarcely notice the occasional murder victim.